Abstract
Tertius Lydgate, the doctor who arrives in Middlemarch as an ambitious medical reformer, has been an obsessive reader of Rasselas as of Gulliver. Indeed, by the age of ten, the already precocious lad had read ‘Chrysal, or the Adventures of a Guinea, which was neither milk for babes, nor any chalky mixture meant to pass for milk’.1 This is to say that he has read those adventures Wherein are Exhibited Views of Several Striking Scenes, with Curious and Interesting Anecdotes of the most Noted Persons in Every Rank of Life, whose Hands it Passed through, in America, England, Holland, Germany, and Portugal. The novel proved so popular that it was reprinted three times before Charles Johnstone expanded it into a four-volume edition in 1764, and so esteemed that it was collected in Ballantyne’s Novelists’ Library in 1822, just a decade before the events of Middlemarch (1872) take place. Though Jonathan Swift may buoyantly breach the human-nonhuman divide in Gulliver’s Travels, Johnstone’s guinea goes so far as to tell its own tale (and the tales of those humans through whose hands or pockets it travels), comfortably inhabiting a literary subgenre in which things become persons — or at least sound and behave rather like them. This is the subgenre of the object autobiography, popular in France as in England, and now widely designated the ‘it-narrative’, whose protagonists — shoes, quills, coats, cats, dogs, cork-screws, coaches, kites, canes, pins, and any number of coins, most famously the gold guinea Chrysal — assume not only authorship but considerable authority when it comes to assessing the lives of humans.2
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Notes
George Eliot, Middlemarch, ed. David Carroll (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 134.
Hippolyte Adolphe Taine, History of English Literature, trans. Henry Van Laun, 3 vols. (New York: Colonial Press, 1900), III, 189.
Jacques Rancière, ‘The Politics of Literature’, SubStance, 33 (2004), 18; Balzac quoted in Rancière, ‘The Politics of Literature’, 19.
Rancière, ‘Politics of Literature’, 19. See also Jacques Rancière, The Future of the Image, trans. Gregory Elliott (New York: Verso, 2007), pp. 11–17.
Of course, a less playful investment in animate matter precedes that eighteenth century — for instance in Mary Cavendish’s claim (from 1668) on behalf of the rationality and sensitivity of matter even down to its ‘smallest particles’. Cavendish quoted in Jonathan Kramnick, Actions and Objects from Hobbes to Richardson (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), p. 67.
See Bill Brown, A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), pp. 151, 177.
Ernst Bloch, The Spirit of Utopia, trans. Anthony A. Nassar (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), p. 7. Further references are given parenthetically in the text.
Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), p. 92.
Theodor Adorno, ‘Lyric Poetry and Society’, trans. Bruce Mayo, in Critical Theory and Society, ed. Stephen Bronner and Douglas Kellner (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 158.
Theodor Adorno, ‘The Handle, the Pot, and Early Experience’, in Notes to Literature, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, 2 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), II, 211, 213. Simmel’s lectures in Berlin were extremely popular, and the subsequent work of many of those in attendance — Bloch, Lukács, Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, and Heidegger — established considerable ground for thinking about object culture.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 353.
Jane Taylor, The Transplant Men (Aukland Park, South Africa: Jacana Media, 2009), p. 20.
Jane Taylor, ‘Introduction’, in Handspring Puppet Company, ed. Jane Taylor (Parkwood, South Africa: Krut Publishing, 2009), p. 19.
See John McCormick, The Victorian Marionette Theatre (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2004).
A recent sample illustrating this disciplinary breadth might include Janet Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Matter of Ecology (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009) from political science;
Graham Harman, Guerrilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things (Chicago: Open Court, 2005) from philosophy;
Jennifer Roberts, Pictures in Transit: Matter, Memory, and Migration in Early American Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011) from art history. See also Things, ed. Bill Brown (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).
Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 79;
Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 54.
Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 69, emphasis in original. Latour goes on to argue, in the subsequent sentence: ‘To limit the discussion to humans, their interests, their subjectivities, and their rights, will appear as strange a few years from now as having denied the right to vote of slaves, poor people, or women.’
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Brown, B. (2012). The Bodies of Things. In: Boehm, K. (eds) Bodies and Things in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137283658_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137283658_11
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